Conserving Disability Within Culturally Sustaining Practices: A New Framework for Educational Transformation

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Expansive Theoretical Considerations for Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

Although traditional educational approaches position difference as a problem to be solved through assimilation and remediation, combining culturally sustaining practices and conserving disability has the potential to disrupt normalizing assumptions and practices. Embracing disability and cultural difference as equally valid ways of being in the world, we explore what a culturally sustaining approach to inclusive classrooms can offer in terms of nurturing and conserving diverse ways of learning and being. We explore several interrelated questions: How do culturally sustaining approaches frame disabilities? How can conserving disability deepen and bring nuance to culturally sustaining approaches? Finally, what might it mean to adopt practices that seek to sustain or conserve disability as an ontological and epistemological resource worthy of valuing and nurturing?

Authors

• Christine Elaine Ashby, Syracuse University

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University

• Teukie Martin, Syracuse University

• Nathan Hughes, Syracuse University